From marketing

We live in an amazing age. It’s the Information Age, version 2.0 – where anyone and everyone has unprecedented access to worldwide knowledge and the ability to contribute to that knowledge-base by creating their own media products.

How easy is it to self-publish your ideas?

Notwithstanding any monetization goals, it’s as easy as making a video with your phone and uploading it to YouTube, or saving any document as a PDF and posting it online. Either way, about three minutes work.

As important as that contribution to our collective knowledge may be, most people consider the act of “self-publishing” to be a commercial endeavor. Making your wisdom, know-how or expertise available to others – for payment.

Self publishing can take the form of physical goods, such as books, DVDs, CDs, etc., or it can be a digital experience, with ebooks, audio files, streaming videos, software, apps, and premium websites.

Regardless of its form, in order for your entrepreneurial venture to have real success and longevity in the marketplace, there are some very important questions you need to ask before you take the plunge.

Here are my seven imperative questions to ask yourself – or your publisher of choice – before you release your knowledge to the masses:

1. Will I get my customer’s contact info?

2. What will my revenue share and fees be for this SPECIFIC product?

3. When will I get paid and how often?

4. What are the content restrictions, if any?

5. How can I update my product if needed?

6. Can I include alternate forms of media?

7. Is there an easy way to gift my product to friends, reviewers, etc.?

To get my thoughts on each of these questions, visit my original post here, or refer to the chart below (click image to view full size).

Revizzit already provided a way to automate your product delivery and content, with capabilities like live-connected updates, dripped content, and customizable modular content.

Now, when customers take actions or purchase products, Infusionsoft can trigger email campaigns, create a tag system to monitor and segment users, and more.

For example, imaging you have created a ten-week course on Revizzit. The customer purchases your product, and is delivered Lesson One. Then, one week later, Lesson Two is automatically added to their product using Revizzit’s drip feature – and so it goes, for ten weeks.

Now with the Infusionsoft integration, your customer can receive an email at time of purchase, encouraging them to get started on Lesson One, available now. Then, a week later, another email arrives that explains the product has automatically been updated and Lesson Two is now available. Everything is completely automated and hands free!

There are plenty more ways to harness the power of these two amazing systems. Get started by watching this tutorial video:

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How To Get Retail Customers To Give You Their Email Address And Beg For More

One of the great tragedies of selling retail, whether physical or digital products, is the anonymity of the buyer – your customer, and the most likely candidate to buy more products from you in the future.

If only there were a way to reclaim these lost contacts – the shoppers at Walmart, Target, or online marketplaces like Amazon or Apple (both notoriously defiant about providing any identifying information about YOUR customers). Well, we have great news – there IS a way, and it not only puts you in contact with your deserved customers but actually makes them more happy and improves the value of your product!

Sound too good to be true? Well, it’s real and happening right this minute, and it may be the most important piece of advice you discover for a long time.

Nick Night is CEO and Co-Founder of Revizzit, and has just put the finishing touches on his new book, SYNCED: A Visionary Approach To Turning Your Products Into Live Broadcasts, Your Customers Into Lifelong Connections, And Your Business Into A Marketing Machine.

In this exclusive, sneak peek inside his book, Nick discusses ways you can connect your products to each other, and create a synergy that leads directly to more sales. He also lets us in on a simple technique to capture those anonymous retail customers and pull them into your funnel with tractor-beam like force.

From Night’s book, SYNCED, chapter 4.1…

There are two ways to live-connect products: digital-to-digital and digital-to-physical. Creating a live-connection between two physical, non-electric products may be somewhat difficult, unless it is two soup cans and a piece of string. So, for the moment, we’ll concern ourselves with connecting two digital products, or a digital and a physical product together.

Digital to digital

Let’s start with our digital products. These can be similar products, such as two ebooks, or it can be dissimilar products, such as an ebook and a video, or a software product and an audio series. Our goal is to connect the products in ways that expose our customers to the rest of our catalog. We’ll dig deeper on this in chapter 4.2.

But having a live connection means you can do more than just advertise the products.The products you connect can become part of the fabric of your product, providing additional value and key benefits. For example:

Content previewing: One of the best ways to bridge your products is to include sample content in each product. Timothy Ferriss has incorporated this quite successfully in his three best-selling titles: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Chef. Each of these books contains a bonus section with substantial excerpts from the other two titles. I think I only lasted about two days after purchasing The 4-Hour Workweek before I bought The 4-Hour Body. Great content is hard to resist. (I also lost about 10 pounds and changed my eating lifestyle following the advice in his book – but that’s a story for another day…)

However, the imperative here is that it needs to be high value content; so don’t just give them the first chapter (ala Amazon’s Look Inside feature). Make sure you give them the best content from the other titles, and the sales will follow. This applies to media content as well – include your #1 audio series episode, your best 15 minutes from your video course or a light, but beneficial, version of your software application.

iBook/Kindle to Revizzit: How great would it be to actually know who the customers are that buy your Kindle and iBooks? Unfortunately, both Amazon and Apple consider the purchasers of your book to be their customers, not yours, and do not provide any uniquely identifying customer information to publishers.

However, there is a strategy that not only gains you the customer’s email address for your list building, but also creates the live-connection to accomplish the objectives of this book.

By adding a page at the front of your book with a Revizzit product link that offers your reader a free, enhanced companion version of the book (or even just enhanced bonus materials), you can convert your ebook buyers into synced customers and harness the new marketing strategies discussed herein. Make sure the offer is of highly perceived value to ensure the maximum conversion rate.

I discuss my actual experiment with this in chapter 6.3, about using the Vouchers feature. Spoiler: I had a #1 bestseller in less than 24 hours!

Physical to digital

If your company sells or distributes any kind of physical goods, whether it’s books, sporting equipment, yoga mats or kitchen widgets, this section alone could transform your business overnight.

When you sell a physical product through merchant outlets (as opposed to direct sales), one of the core elements of your business gets lost – the ability to market to your existing customers. In fact, you don’t even know who your customers are!

This is not exclusive to the brick-and-mortar retailers, either. Neither Amazon nor Apple will provide you with any identifying customer information from those that purchase YOUR products!

Physical products sold through retail outlets traditionally result in thousands of “anonymous” customers. By including a built-in digital component, the customers’ information can be captured during redemption, resulting in not only an email lead, but also (if on Revizzit) a live-connected user.

Here are some ways to achieve this transformational objective for your company:

The first step is to create a highly valued, exclusive* companion digital product that complements the physical product. For example, if you were selling yoga mats, you might include a free, one hour yoga essentials video with each purchase. Or if you are selling a juicer, you might produce a dozen quick and easy juice recipes (as an enhanced video book) for a healthier lifestyle.

Another example would be a bonus training manual, showing some additional creative ways to use the physical product, such as “20 more things you can use your yoga mat for everyday”.

Whatever the incentive is, by getting your customers to redeem your free gift, you are accessing the most highly converting, least expensive marketing leads in the world – satisfied customers. And by providing this extra value, you just made them even more satisfied!

*Note: Make sure the gift is only available to buyers of the product. This exclusivity increases the perceived value of the offer, and if delivered on Revizzit, also creates a live-connected product that only customers can access, providing yet another marketing channel for deals and promotions.

There you have it! One simple change you can do right now that will forever change your business – and it can start being effective overnight!

If you’d like to read more of Nick Night’s book, you can purchase the live-connected eBook on his website, SyncedBook.com

If you liked this article, make sure to share it, tweet it, post it or mention it at cocktail parties.

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One of the great mysteries of paid traffic is understanding the factors that motivate the Google Gods to place your PPC ad in position 1, 2 or even 3. This positioning is determined by something called Ad Rank. But how can you improve your Ad Rank? You do this by improving your Quality Score, which is what we’re going to explain here. (We also have a little help from Google’s Chief Economist, Val Harian, in an easy to follow video in this post!)

The first thing to know is that this is an AUCTION.

You are bidding against other advertisers for the opportunity to put your ad in front of user’s eyeballs. But if you think the merchant willing to pay the most money wins, you’d be wrong. Here’s why…

There are really four considerations to who wins top placement. These are:

How much you are willing to pay per click (duh!)

Your ad copy (does it make people click on the ad?)

The relevance of your ad (does your ad copy match the user’s query?)

The quality of your landing page (does the destination match the ad, the query and the keyword?)

What’s interesting to note is that all of these things are in your control. So we can stop blaming those cheddar heads at Google.
Turns out we’re the cheddar heads.

So, let’s break those four qualifiers down a little more.

Number 1: Bid price
This is pretty easy to grasp. Bid as much as you can afford to pay. Remember, you can bid higher and lower your daily budget to manage expenses if necessary.

Another important thing to know when setting up your AdWords campaign – when it comes to keywords, LESS is MORE. Gone are the days when you could have hundreds of keywords in your campaign to try and hit a bigger target. Google likes small, focused groups of keywords that are actually contained in the content. Every landing page should try to incorporate it’s target keywords in the URL, the copy and the ad itself.

Number 2: Click Through Rate (CTR)I know, I know… Number 2 changed from “Ad Copy” to “CTR”. I did this to make a point. As it turns out, CTR is the single biggest factor in determining your Ad Rank. Google holds public opinion in the highest regard – thus, if lots of people click on your ad, it must be a good ad.

The question, then, is “How do I get people to want to click on my ad?”

Well, provided that you have correctly identified the target audience through proper keywords, the only motivating factor left is COPY. When you have good, enticing, relevant, even controversial copy, people will want to click on it.

Number 3: Ad RelevanceRelated and relevant are not the same thing. If someone searches for “best rated golf clubs”, they are unlikely to click on the ad that says, “Glow-in-the-dark golf balls”. They’re related by golf categorically, but that’s not what the user is searching for. And when they don’t click on your displayed ad, your CTR goes down and drags down your Quality Score with it! So give ‘em what they want by choosing relevant keywords and writing relevant copy.

Number 4: Landing Page Quality
When someone does click on your ad, they are directed to a webpage. This initial page is their “landing page”, and it is another huge factor in determining your Quality Score.

There are many things that contribute to a successful landing page, and there are endless tutorials available online to help. One of the chief contributors is again, relevancy. Google wants to see consistency across the spectrum of the user experience, so be certain that what is advertised is what they get. Some ways to help ensure this? Use the keyword (or keyphrase) in the landing page URL and the headline of the content, as well as in the body copy. For example, in our (fictional) “best rated golf clubs” scenario:

Transparency in intention. If you are trying to get an opt-in, make sure that is clear in the ad. If you are selling something, try not to sell on the landing page, but rather give valuable content and then offer a link for more information about your product or service.

So, now with that understanding in place, let’s meet Val Harian, the Chief Economist at Google, who will explain exactly how the Quality Score is calculated so you can CRUSH IT with your AdWords campaign!

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Even though we have a technology team at our beck and call, we don’t like to pester them with our micro-split-testing adjustments every other day. They have enough to do, and frankly, their time (expensive as it is) is far better served doing something mind-boggling in Matrix-land, working to make Revizzit even better than it is.

So, when we discovered Unbounce, there was a collective “Schwinnnng!” that could be heard all the way to Wayne’s World.

Unbounce provides marketers with an easy to use, WYSIWYG editor that allows for creation, tracking and A/B split-testing of landing pages. They make it easy to integrate your CMS lead generators, Google Analytics and even Javascript. Plus, they have a host of great looking templates to get you up and running fast.

We immediately set out creating our landing and sales pages, set up some variants to split test, then in a few days we went back and looked at the results. We never had to rely on HTML coding or, more importantly, our technology team.

Okay, I admit it. I’m having fun using Unbounce to make our pages. I enjoy making small changes and then looking at the data, awarding a champion page – and then tweaking that one some more. When was the last time you could say it’s fun doing your job? Unless, of course, you are also using Revizzit

Finally, we wouldn’t feel right if we didn’t mention the other thing Unbounce does really well. That would be blogging. The Unbounce blog is inspiring, informational and enjoyable to read. We can only hope to match them in the blogosphere… Check out their blog at http://unbounce.com/blog/